The Washington Post had a long article on the Two Americas of Dentistry. You have people who can afford to spend lots of cash to make their teeth a few shades whiter and people (including people with good jobs) who have to line up for hours to get teeth pulled.

I do find it odd that Dental Insurance often seems more to work as a pre-paid plan instead of true risk-pooling and often doesn’t cover everything.Report

One of the things I am most grateful for in my benefits package is good and cheap dental insurance. I have bad teeth (apparently it’s a genetic thing) and I have four crowns – would have cost me something like $12,000 if I paid out of pocket – but I wound up paying maybe $900 for all of them. (Did NOT have them done all at once! They have slowly built up over the years).

If I didn’t have insurance and was told “We can crown the tooth for $3000 or pull it for $200,” I admit I’d have to think really hard about “How much would I miss the functionality of having a tooth there”

Also, my insurance covers all my prophylactic care. The premiums I pay run about what two cleanings/checkups and a set of x-rays per year would cost me, but still….it’s good to have that insurance in case of an emergency, like the time I broke a tooth really spectacularly badly.

AFAIK, ours is more of a risk-pool type of system rather than prepaid.Report

Dental care is treated oddly like cosmetic surgery rather than something actually important in the American healthcare system. This is even though you can go for years without needing to see a medical doctor but keeping your teeth healthy requires two trips a year to a dentist to keep your teeth healthy.Report

I think the article explains this well as a long accident of history when barbers had a monopoly on tooth pulling for centuries.

The other aspect that goes into this geography. According to the article, dentists tend to have more student debt than others but need to go solo because that economic model is tough to break. So dentists will just flock to areas where people can and will pay a premium for nice looking teeth and have fancy looking offices.Report

In Canada they provide a lot of standard care for kids-through teenagers (and a lot of fluoridation treatments to harden kids teeth). Then once you’re a teen it’s basically figure it out yourself.Report

My understanding is that, as a rule of thumb, the aspects of dentistry that are necessary for maintaining health are routine expenses (regular checkups) and/or relatively cheap (filling or pulling infected teeth). The more expensive options are mostly elective and cosmetic (e.g. crown instead of removal). There’s no dental equivalent of cancer, which is expensive, unpredictable, and life-threatening. So there’s not much there to insure, precisely because it’s so routine.

I mean, I get that what people really want is not so much insurance but free dental care, but that’s probably why insurance isn’t really viable.Report

I also believe that other countries never quite fetishized white and straight teeth with no overbite like the United States has. Orthodontry exists everywhere but braces don’t seem to be such the right of adolescent passage in other countries and this includes middle class and above people who could easily afford it.Report

Shiny straight and white teeth with no overbite does seem to exist as something as an American obsession. From what I’ve understood, dentistry was always more common in the United States than it was in other wealthy developed nations even during the 19th century.Report

“I also believe that other countries never quite fetishized white and straight teeth with no overbite like the United States has. ”

I get that you have this class-warfare thing going, and that’s cool for you, I’m glad it’s working out, but I have scars on my tongue from where I used to chew the shit out of it before I had my teeth fixed so don’t be rolling around thinking that tooth-straightening is a rich-soft-white-American cosmetic fetish.

Also I have never seen a single Asian ad with someone who didn’t have perfect straight white teeth, and I guess you’ll say that’s just because of American cultural influence, but it is a data point.Report

You’re right about that. There are a lot of potential problems that come from teeth not being in the right place. People underestimate the potential badness of it because of how often crooked teeth don’t cause any problems at all.Report

Remember when Martin Amis got his teeth fixed? What a complete sh** storm that turned out to be.

Part of what took everyone aback, said Peter Straus, the editor of Picador, a division of Macmillan, is that Mr. Amis is a literary novelist, not a commercial writer like the high-earning authors Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham and Barbara Taylor Bradford. “Commerce and literature are still meant to be separate in England,” Mr. Straus said. “If you’re writing mass-market fiction, it doesn’t matter your price: you can be as vulgar as you want in terms of money. But somehow that isn’t the same for literary fiction.”

Famous English writer, son of famous English writer, fixes teeth when he has money, literati go nuts.Report

Where this sucks is when your teeth are damaged, but not missing. I’ve had multiple dentists write up lengthy explanations as to why I need to have crowns to fix my teeth because over the long term, I will have jaw alignment problems. But since my teeth are still in my mouth and technically functional today, dental insurance won’t cover crowns since they consider them cosmetic. They won’t even cover a portion of the cost.Report

I’m sure you’ve had this conversation before, but I’m curious. It seems like you might be able to approach that as orthodontia rather than dentistry; does your insurance coverage treat those two things differently?Report

Orthodontia was partially covered, so the teeth are in the right spot.

Growing up my folks did not have dental coverage or enough money for anything by basic checkups. I’m a grinder, so all my adult teeth were ground down quite badly before I was told to wear night guards. This is why my jaw doesn’t align properly (teeth are too short).

The Navy was going to fix my teeth (orthodontia & crowns) right after I got back from WestPac, except right after I got back from WestPac, I got hit by a car on the highway. Suddenly my teeth become a minor concern as the Navy figured out if I was going back on full duty or getting retired.

A few years back, I got the uppers crowned for about $15K. I was going to get the lowers done last year for $10K, but the stem cell procedure for the knee took priority. Hopefully we can get the lowers done this year, if nothing else pops up to suck up the savings.Report

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….

Jeffrey Epstein, the millionaire financier and accused sex trafficker, is dead by suicide, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

The officials told NBC News he was found at 7:30 a.m. ET at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and that he hanged himself.

Epstein accuser claims she was ordered to have sex with prominent men

He was transported Saturday morning from the Metropolitan Correctional Center to a hospital in Lower Manhattan. Upon arrival, he was in cardiac arrest, people familiar with the matter say.

Epstein, 66, was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

He was arrested July 6 in Teterboro, New Jersey, as he returned from Paris on a private jet.

He had pleaded not guilty and was denied bail.

The indictment on his case showed that he sought out minors, some as young as 14, from at least 2002 through 2005 and paying them hundreds of dollars in cash for sex at either his Manhattan townhouse or his estate in Palm Beach, Florida, federal prosecutors revealed last month.

Epstein was charged with one count of sex trafficking conspiracy and one count of sex trafficking. He faced up to 45 years in prison if found guilty.